At the same time, U.S.-style constitutional federalism has become the order of the day in an extraordinarily large number of very important countries, some of which once might have been thought of as pure nation-states. Thus, the Federal Republic of Germany, the Republic of Austria, the Russian Federation, Spain, India, and Nigeria all have decentralized power by adopting constitutions that are significantly more federalist than the ones they replaced.(25) Many other nations that had been influenced long ago by American federalism have chosen to retain and formalize their federal structures. Thus, the federalist constitutions of Australia, Canada, Brazil, Argentina, and Mexico, for example, all are basically alive and well today.

The modern form of federalism forged in 1787 by the framers of the U.S. Constitution made large-scale democracy possible for the first time in history. The United States is the first continental-size polity to be governed in a reasonably democratic manner. Today, the territorially largest political societies having a claim to democracy are formally federal: Australia, Brazil, Canada, India, the United States, and now perhaps Russia.

World-wide interest in federalism is greater today than it ever has been before at any other time in human history. In section A, below, I discuss at some length why this is the case and what lessons the global federalism revolution might hold for the United States. I conclude that federalism is the wave of the future, that nationalism and the centralized nation-state have been discredited for good reasons, and that these reasons strongly suggest that the United States should retain and strengthen its federal structure. Having developed what might be called a comparative empirical case for federalism I then turn, in section B, to developing the theoretical normative case for federalism. Both the disciplines of economics and political science suggest that there is a good case to be made for federalism. I develop this case in three subparts by considering, first, the arguments for state power, second, the arguments for national power, and third, the arguments for a federal constitutional blend. Finally, in section C, I step back and look briefly at the empirical and normative arguments for federalism in perspective. My goal here is to show that federalism is likely to be more important to the liberty and well being of the American people than any other structural feature of our Constitution, including the separation of powers, the Bill of Rights, and judicial review.